Field of the Invention
The disclosed methods and systems relate generally to machine readable or interpretable social networks, and more particularly to indexing members of one or more of these networks across their associations and optionally customizing content based on such.
Description of Related Art
Two often-cited patents in regards to social networking are the “Six Degrees Patent”, U.S. Pat. No. 6,175,831 to Weinreich et al., and the “Friendster Patent”, U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,308 to Abrams,—both of which hinge on the construction of a database of users where relationships between any two users are described and navigated.
While useful, both patents suffer from the following limitations, to which their claims and design are specifically tied:
i. Both inventions address social networking within a self-enclosed system of members/subscribers—that is the Inter-Personal relationships between identities are only defined as relationships between subscriber-users of a single system, requiring all individuals involve to subscribe to the service in order to be included in any chained relationship of identities.
ii. Both inventions intrinsically tie the defined relationship between any two identities as a direct relationship between the subscribed user account/user account identifier.
iii. Both inventions closely resemble the PGP ‘web of trust’ system that was publicly released in September 1992, in that a user is tied to a single id/key as an Intra-Personal relationship, and that single key/id is tied to other users as Inter-Personal relationships.